Art and Design Commons^™

On The Impulse To Notate, Lydia Chodosh

Masters Theses

On the Impulse to Notate assembles an array of dialogic encounters. Composed in fragments — written and collected, designed and curated — this catalog resists linear narrative formulas to favor an open poetic syntax.

Here, the designer relies on her propensity to notate, aggregate, and persistently recompose.

She materializes language that promotes movement toward knowledge and craft in conversation.

She reads and translates stories spatially, frequently shifting their frames.

In Shame I Will Find Paradise, Taehee Whang

Theses and Dissertations

As a Korean American non-binary digital artist and designer, my recent explorations have focused on using voice as a medium to articulate nuanced feelings of displacement and the intricate relationships between language, identity, and expression. This journey expands beyond my personal experiences with gender dysphoria, delving into the lives of non-binary and transgender individuals undergoing gender-affirming voice therapy. Through my thesis research, I have developed interactive multimedia installations inspired by dialogues with individuals such as Umico Niwa, who traveled to Korea for voice feminization surgery, and Jeong Yoon Lee from Hyperlink Press, a four-year participant in Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

菠蘿包(Pineapple Bun): Exploring Memory And Language Through Animation, Elaine Yang

Scripps Senior Theses

菠蘿包(Pineapple Bun) explores the themes of reconstruction, evocation, and memory through my childhood in Taiwan. Inspired by other Asian American animators, I aim to tell a simple story of connection through my grandfather and I's daily swimming ritual. The film is a 3-minute animated short film following our language barrier and how we engage with each other's differing backgrounds.

Slow Ruptures; Slow Formations, Asta Thrastardottir

Masters Theses

Language shapes our understanding of identity, place, and self. As a graphic designer, I question the existing structures of language, while using it as a material to build new formations. Nudging against certainties, I challenge how the stories we are told can dispossess us, even flatten us.

My method is a constant attempt to peel back the layers and study what lingers below. When questions arise, I look to the ways in which visual artists and writers have seen through this surface. I observe, listen, and hold stories closely, passing them back and forth between my hands. Using annotation and …

≥I++ Wayward Self, Space, And Language, Mystie Do, Thu Tm Do

Theses and Dissertations

Having crossed different geographical and cultural borders, I can’t seem to position myself beyond society’s forced binaries of race, sexuality, and materiality. My personal diasporic experience drives me to bring together various presences, putting them next to one another, engaging them in dialogues. My works often share multiple space–time possibilities: a digital space, a physical site, a virtual alternity. Occupying these parallel worlds are varied ratios of mixtures of natural ecosystems, my own system of abstraction, and existing technological systems that allow us a level of individual engagement not previously available. I want to invite people to fluctuate between these …

Staves & Stones: The Truth Of Runic Tradition, Josiah John Duff

Masters Theses

The research problem and task for this thesis was in the analysis of the Old Norse Futhark, or written runic language and how it has been represented through history. In order to educate the reader with a greater understanding and put the runes in context, the runes are analyzed thoroughly before being compared and contrasted to other runic systems that have been represented in modern media. The objective being to identify these similarities and differences in each language and maintain a consistent criteria to measure each language, via original use, design and form, and in-mythos development. Using this criteria and …

Memory Bread, Nisiqi

Art + Design Masters Theses

Memory Bread, constituting a daily performance ritual and the post-action objects, seeks to address the generational decline of mother language use in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a post-colonized province of China. I chose to eat sliced white bread in the performance and later casted concrete sculptures as the extension of the action for both substances’ capitalistic nature. Being an invasive material that took over the traditional architectural lifestyle, the use of concrete mirrors the pervasive cultural and ethnic assimilation in China. Meanwhile, the materiality of concrete being a mixture of various substances also metaphors the mixed culture that Chinese-Mongolians …

Space As A Practiced Place, Elizabeth Leeper

Masters Theses

This thesis examines and retraces ways in which graphic design is fundamentally concerned with relational space, and tests spatialized theories, methods, and potential for praxis.

My practice investigates the relational qualities and dimensions of graphic design at three distinct scales.

1. Spatial logic (format) within a design object [Design space, book space, format, structure, sequence, counterforms, etc. (authority structure vs agency of user) within the design].

2. Spatial relations (sequence) between participants across a network. [Space to hear & see each other; to relate and connect].

3. Space within the world (circulation) [Space as composition, product, relational; not container, not …

Traversing Languagescapes, Desmond Pang

Masters Theses

To maneuver is to design. As a multilingual graphic designer, I maneuver across different languages and their respective scripts. My work invites my audience to take a leap with me into unknown languagescapes.

Through sampling, analyzing similarities and differences, switching applications and contexts, challenging functions, inserting and overlaying recognizable visual systems as well as combining disparate language scripts, I become a guide for my audience, assisting them, regardless of mother tongue, to attain a degree of understanding when faced with an unfamiliar language.

My thesis asserts the critical role graphic designers play in demystifying and cracking language barriers. Every graphic …

Space: A Discovery Of Visual Language, Kelley White

Theses and Dissertations

Space is a visual communicator. The act of perceiving space is a neurological soiree that projects and negotiates meaning in our constructed world. The poetry that we observe within space is tied directly to our emotions and to previous experience. Within ourselves, we each have particular feelings, unconscious or not, relating to height, length, and depth, as well as light and shadow. For example, a long, narrow hallway may elicit anxiety, while an open, sunlit nave in a cathedral may bring about feelings of serenity and joy. Our observations and interactions within the perceptual confines of space reveal clues to …

Space And Emotional Urgency In Contemporary Art, Johannes H. Von Gumppenberg

Johannes von Gumppenberg Books

This booklet was prepared as a magazine article, yet never published. Written before the more comprehensive book, The Formulation of a Graphic Language, it offers an introduction to the fundamental concepts later developed there to fuller range.